The html error from the phoned-in reply in my last post was my fault – over the phone I couldn’t remember which way the slash was supposed to go. Mea culpa.

Cutest thing I saw today: four lambs finding a gap in their fence and running through it into a big lush empty field. I’ve never seen sheep so excited – the older ones didn’t take any interest at all. I wonder if a sheep grew up in the wild it would retain some of its youthful sense of adventure? Probably not.

Saddest thing I saw today: Some guy on a quad bike riding up the shallow rocky stream that runs through the middle of Fielding. He had a mullet and everything.

If a shallow rocky stream ran up the centre of Wellington, I wonder if young people in suits would ride up it on their Segways? Talking on their mobile phones? Looking glum because their lives are meaningless?

Today I spent five minutes in Bulls then six hours in Fielding and now I’m in Marton for the night. I’m trying to expand my repertoire of boring places to be.

I’ve been working on that silhouette style I posted the other day. Normally when I embark on some new webcomic concept I prematurely create a comicgenesis page for it before I realise I don’t have the persistence to go through with it. Photographing lego? Bah, too complicated. Moving limbless oval bodies around in Flash? Way too much effort. Drawing simple stick figure silhouettes on silhouette backgrounds? Hmm… Yeah, I’ll give that a go. But I’ll prove to myself that it’s not too much of a chore for me to hold a black vivid and wave it around before establishing any kind of web presence for it.

If I’d persisted with that lego comic I started ages ago I’d probably have enough strips to fill at least one book with. I’ll try not to think about that.

I used to do a weekly thing where I’d check for exciting new webcomics to bookmark. That became a fortnightly thing, then a monthly thing… now I do it once a year or so. According to my latest research pretty much no new noteworthy webcomics have been created in the last four years. Did people just stop trying or what?

Things that put me off webcomics very quickly:

* Not having a ‘first comic’ link. I mean seriously, I’m new to the comic, that’s where I’m going to want to start. Why must you make me wade through pages of archives to find the first comic? I don’t have that much patience.
* Manga. Anything manga. Before Japan was invented there were other ways to draw, you know.
* Comics where all girls have large breasts or where men can transform into half-wolf women and have sex with half-eagle women who have turned into men. I don’t want to hear about weird teenage boy fetishes.
* A combination of both of the above. In other words, most popular yet lame webcomics.
* Anything that Strong Bad would mock.

I had to watch this music video before I could understand the latest Weebl & Bob. I have no idea if I would have appreciated the music listening to it on its own, but I liked the music video so much that I had to go and borrow a Ladytron CD from the library.

The moral of the story is that if you want to succeed as a musician these days, it helps to:

* know a great music video creator.
* not threaten legal action when your music video appears on YouTube.
* Inspire popular web cartoonists to pay homage to you.

I have the strangest conversations with my girlfriend while she’s asleep.

This is just a quick sketch to give myself a visual idea of a ‘shadow puppet’ comic style I’ve been contemplating. Clicking the image makes it bigger.

It’s supposed to be a guy in a three-sized piratey hat sitting on a tree stump sketching some sort of curly fern thing. That’s what it looks like to me but I realise that because of the lack of detail it might look like something completely different to someone else. Like a janitor sitting on a pinball machine in a landslide.

I started writing a book tonight. But then I started writing three books over the last two weeks. If the word ‘started’ also means ‘strongly intended to start’, then there are five other books I also probably ‘started’ as well. In fact if I stayed up all night I could have ‘started’ at least seventeen new books by the morning.

My cat is sleeping next to me on the couch, which is nice. He’s not really ‘my’ cat but he does seem to spend every night in my bedroom. And he eats all my catfood.

It’s nice that he’s sleeping because he’s usually trying to kill me. Here is how he reacts to various stimuli:

Bright lights: tries to kill me.
Loud noises: tries to kill me.
Sudden movements: tries to kill me.
Trying to get him out from under the couch: tries to kill me.
Going to work in the morning: tries to kill me.